FreeS/WAN occupies a position very rarely found in efficient markets, such as open source software. While the position is rarely encountered, it can nonetheless exist: I believe that FreeS/WAN is a natural monopoly. ... But for whatever reasons, FreeS/WAN has been holding such a natural monopoly position in by far the largest market in which I have ever seen such a beast. I find this fascinating. I wonder if economists will some day study the case to determine what factors brought it about.
I doubt it. The Linux kernels released by Linus Torvalds hold a similar 'natural monopoly' over every other variant of free operating system kernel. What could explain this puzzling economic phenomenon? Certainly the BSD folks have been puzzled by it. I mean, half a dozen people have rewritten 'grep', because it's just not that hard. And troff was cloned even though it was hard, because the original was such a piece of unmaintainable (and nonfree) crud. But you and you and you are all free to make your own variant of the Linux kernel, and keep maintaining it and throwing in improvements. Why don't you? Even big companies keep following Linus's version. Perhaps the puzzle results from someone who does a sufficiently hard job, sufficiently well, that nobody who is actually capable of competing WANTS to compete. They have better things to do. What puzzles me is how the mediocre X Window System has attracted no competitors. Yes, it's a hard job supporting all those hardware variants by all those lovely undocumented proprietary companies. But the X model sucks on SO many fronts, breaking typeahead/mouseahead, performance, display independence, having dozens of puzzling and incompatible window managers, etc. And have you looked at the 'object oriented' stuff layered on top of it? 743 root 17 0 50896 44M 6320 S 0.7 36.0 15292m X 874 gnu 11 0 14648 10M 3148 S 0.3 8.6 13:30 gnome-terminal That's a 50Mbyte process (44M resident) of window drivers, and a 14Mbyte (10M resident) terminal window that I'm typing into. I've seen the terminal window get as high as 60 Mbytes, with more than 50 resident. John